First Look: The small-but-mighty Maingear Potenza SuperStock

-Hi, I'm Rich Brown, senior editor for CNET.
Today, we're gonna take a look at the Maingear Potenza Super Stock.
This is Maingear's high end small form factor gaming desktop.
You can see it's got some nice clean looks and this has some fast performance inside this box.
And you have to compromise to do its size little bit.
Not quite most of upgradable PC we've seen.
And because that it can't add a second graphics card, and you can get other PCs in this price range with 2 cards to give a bit more performance.
As long as you understand the sacrifices of this,
this is a pretty great high end gaming system.
It's like a lot of Maingear designs we've seen recently that the ports and the system are actually at the top of the case.
You take up this plastic vent inside you can see there is the power buttons, a couple of USB ports here.
Down on the motherboard, you'll see inputs for USB 3.0 as well as various kinds of audio.
Now, on the front of the case, you can see there is one slot here DVD drive.
There's no Blu-ray drive of the system that you can get that as an option.
The same part of the magic with the system is as soon as you take these panels off.
Front panel pops down and so did the back
and this side.
Now, this side of the case is fixed to the chassis, but the rest of it gives you pretty clean access of the inside the system.
So you'll note that this is a really compact design inside of here, and in fact, I didn't even try to get the graphics card off because I really wasn't sure if I can get that back in.
It's sort of [unk] on the top and the bottom here.
From this side of the case, you can see here is the slim optical drive.
If you look over here, we can see here's the hard drive slot, the liquid cooling pipes.
Down here is the heat exchanger.
There is memory in there as well as liquid-cooled CPU.
Supports component, the system has an overclocked Core i7 3770K CPU, 8 gigs of memory NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 graphics card as well as solid state and standard mechanical hard drive set up.
Now, on our lab, we found this as one of the fastest PCs for application testing, and for games, it's among the fastest in terms of single card PCs.
The only real a real caveat as far as the performance I mentioned.
You can buy a similar PC in the same price range that has 2 higher end graphics cards that will give you better performance especially if you go to 2 displays.
So I can really only recommend the system if you needed particularly compact gaming desktop or feel like this close.
Overall, its price is fair for it.
You get if you include size on that premium, but just have to understand that you sacrifice some upgrading as well as some potential higher end graphics capability.
So, I'm Rich Brown this is Maingear Potenza Super Stock.